Backup challenges are becoming more and more complex in these days and due to which the SLA (software level agreement) are become even more and more demanding. There is always a persistent push to reduce the backup window, making it intelligent using technology advancements. We have seen the evolution of backups to smart and advanced backups—the introduction of snapshots, deduplication, etc. Backup software has inbuilt intelligence, the layer in between has intelligence, the target devices has become far more advanced all to make backup faster, better and efficient. However, still there are certain situations that depend upon application hosts to be intelligent to gain out of the real potential.
Most of the trend and analytics are not custom made to provide such granularity which can help providing valuable insight. Even the ones currently available are not too granular. For example, most analytics can provide details at a file system level but not as granular as block level. Having the information available at such high level can impact the decision making as there is fair bit of assumption involved. If this information is required for specific solutions like backups and storage capacity or pay-as-use etc., the profile of a data set is needed.